imon Joyce's LGBT Victorians and Meg Dobbins's Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature both include a "Coda" on Oscar Wilde at the end of their books. However, although both books explore the question of "queerness" in the nineteenth century, they do so in markedly different ways and looking at very diverse evidence. Joyce's impressively scholarly book focuses on histories of LGBT people and the relationship of these histories to the emerging field of sexology in the nineteenth century. Dobbins's book presents thoughtful analyses of a number of Victorian novels within the framework of economic history and theory. Yet, even as they take up distinct positions on gender and sexuality, as well as on social and economic culture, both books trace ways in which the Victorian period was one of instability and transformation. Both also adumbrate strategies of resistance to confining social, moral, and economic structures during the nineteenth century.
In his acknowledgments to LGBT Victorians, Joyce tells us that his personal experience as the parent of a trans child feeds into the book (v), a fact which may account for the throughline of connecting the histories of LGBT Victorians to the development of gay and trans rights. The book is divided into three sections: Part One, "Coalescing Concepts," has two chapters: 1. "On or About 1820: Modalities of Lesbian Emergence"; 2. "Ulrichs' Riddles." Part Two: "Victorian Sexology and the Problem of Effeminacy," has two chapters also: 3. "John Addington Symonds and the Problems of Ethical Homosexuality"; 4. "Towards an Intermediate Sex: Edward Carpenter's Queer Palimpsests." Part Three: "Gay Men/Trans Women," again has two chapters: 5. "Two Women Walk into a Theater Restroom: The Trial of Fanny and Stella"; 6. "Bodies in Transition: Trans-Curiosity in Late-Victorian Pornography." The above mentioned Coda is titled "And I? May I Say Nothing, My Lord?"
The first part of the introduction discusses Anne Lister (1791-1840) and includes photographs of two plaques put up by the York Civic Trust to "commemorate Lister's 1834 sharing of the sacrament with a lover and neighbor Ann Walker at Holy Trinity Church in York as an anticipation of marriage equality" (1). Here, at the beginning of the book, Joyce notes the many terms that have to confront the question of anachronism (1). He is careful to define his terms and to show the fluid nature of terminology in this field. For example, the question of identity versus practice must be considered when it comes to defining the term "homosexual" (36). Discussing Anne Lister's story, Joyce notes the idea of intense but asexual friendship that prevailed in early nineteenth-century discussions of lesbian couples, in a time when many did not believe that lesbianism could even exist (46). For example, the chapter includes an account of the trial of Pirie and Woods in 1816, in which the judge did not believe that lesbian sex was even possible (35). Joyce shows how letters and poems could be some means of communicating lesbian love (55).
Turning then to categories and learned behaviors of gender, Joyce looks first at the work of the "influential sexological writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who lived mostly in what is now Germany" (v) and presents an examination of nineteenth-century sexology, for example, in "the twelve pamphlets printed between 1864 and 1880 by Ulrichs, who is sometimes referred to as the 'first public activist' for homosexual rights or (in the translated title of a recent German study) as 'the first gay man in world history'" (19). The chapter titled "Ulrichs' Riddles" starts with the question of the gay man having a female soul in a male body, which Ulrich developed from the Latin anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa. This idea, Joyce suggests, has been seen as problematic and leading to increased homophobia. What Joyce wants to do is to reexamine Ulrichs' theories in light of transgender identity and rights (72).
Joyce notes that Ulrichs is considered to be the first man to openly admit his attraction to other men. In September 1862 he began sending a series of letters to his family. He used the term "Uranians" or "Urnings," and he told his sister that it would be impossible for him to feel heterosexual attraction (75). He was then thinking about the idea of a third sex, including the idea of hermaphroditism and intersex people (76). In his letters, Ulrichs mentions hermaphrodites of the animal kingdom, such as snails and oysters, thus emphasizing their natural dimension (77). Among other sexologists, the book also talks about Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the first to use the term "inversion" and among those who pathologized homosexuality (97). Joyce also considers Magnus Hirschfeld (104) and other theorists, writers, and campaigners for LGBT rights.
The first chapter of Part Two examines John Addington Symonds and his connecting of models and writings of Classical Greece to Victorian homosexuality (134). In many ways, Symonds contrasts with the socialist and early gay rights activist Edward Carpenter, the subject of the second chapter in Part Two. For example, Joyce argues that Symonds' expressed desire for working class men and dislike of effeminacy almost seem like sexual tourism whereas Carpenter's desire for these men was connected to his concern with social-class disparities (157). Indeed, says Joyce, Carpenter felt that his homosexuality and the need for socialist reconstruction were "indivisible" (157).
Joyce looks at two pamphlets that Carpenter published in the mid-1890s: Homogenic Love (1895) and An Unknown People (1897) (161). He notes the disruption in Carpenter's writing caused by the Wilde trial in 1895 and examines the silencing effects of the Labouchere amendment and the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1891, in which many saw the poor rent boys and other lower-class men as "having taken the fall" for the aristocrats involved, all of whom escaped prosecution (165-66). He argues that Carpenter heavily edited his first pamphlet to downplay the physical aspects of homosexual love in favor of its intellectual side (170). The pamphlets also emphasize emotional fulfilment, sympathy, and companionship, whether between man and man or woman and woman (171). Such a focus could defuse conservative anxieties about gay love, but it also underlines Carpenter's wish for more equitable love relationships among different social classes.
In the section of the chapter on Carpenter and the New Woman, Joyce maintains that Carpenter was not the misogynist that many believe him to have been. Rather, Joyce argues that in another pamphlet, titled "Woman and her Place in a Free Society," Carpenter's views harmonize with many concerns of the New Woman: "the crisis of marriage, the mutual alienation of men and women, and the need for new forms of political and civic leadership" (175). Moreover, Joyce mentions a problematic aspect of some New Woman writing at the time, which occasionally attacked male effeminacy as a symptom of degenerate masculinity (180). Here he cites a particularly egregious passage from Olive Schreiner's Woman and Labour (1911). Dating from the 1880s, the passage reproduces stereotypes of gay men as effete and only interested in the pursuit of pleasure (181).
The final section of the book, Part Three: Gay Men / Trans Women, opens with the trial of Fanny and Stella in 1870-71 (190). Joyce notes that this trial introduced two new terms into English: camp and drag (211). The theatrical and spectacular nature of these figures, including their large archive of photographs, makes them an interesting subject in the history of Victorian responses to queer culture and people. Chapter 6 discusses Teleny (1893), the pornographic fantasy novel collectively authored, possibly in part by Wilde. Joyce suggests that this novel imagines a same-sex relationship of the kind of reciprocity imagined by Symonds and Carpenter. He notes that another novel of the period, The Romance of Violette (1891), goes even further, representing different relationships among straight, bisexual, lesbian, and intersex bodies. In the Coda on Wilde, Joyce explains that Wilde is not extensively treated in the book because he is such a towering figure and because he is associated in many people's minds with the century that followed him rather than the one that produced him.
Like Simon Joyce, Meg Dobbins spends a lot of time defining terms at the opening of her book, but her focus is on economic history rather than the history of gender and sexuality. Specifically, she deploys economic as opposed to erotic or gendered connotations of the word "queer." In this sense, she mentions "Queer Street" (3) and the use of this term for being financially embarrassed, as it is used once, for example, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (7). Dobbins associates queerness with "dissonance," a word she uses to mean disruption or resistance from the margins. Set against this dissonant or "queer" economy are those nineteenth-century innovations that led to the modern capitalist system, such as paper money, the gold standard, the Joint Stock Bank Act of 1826, the Limited Liability Act of 1855, business partnerships, and the "gradual institutionalization of financial services including stockbroking, banking, accounting, and insurance" (4). In her introduction, she also talks about innovators in economic thought, such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham (10-11). In the chapters, she continues to weave the theories of economists such as Mill, Bentham, and Adam Smith into her reading of Victorian fiction.
In the nineteenth century, Dobbins notes, the idea of "economic self-interest" emerged. This kind of self-interest, she suggests, could be a bulwark against xenophobia and racism, such as that expressed by Carlyle and through the "imperialist narrative" that underlies virtually all economic thought in this period (16-17). In other words, the book will draw broad connections among race, empire and sex, gender, and sexuality (18). The chapters that follow, she tells us, focus on various "eccentric economic figures: the lower-class financial clerk, the economically emancipated Victorian woman, the Black businesswoman, the widow heroine, the working-class miser and his disobedient daughter, and the bankrupt dandy" (24). Chapter 1 is on the clerk; Chapter 2 is on Victorian women and their "queer economic desires and strategies" (25); Chapter 3 is on Mary Seacole; Chapter 4 is on the widow and the miser; and the Coda is on Oscar Wilde.
Chapter 1, "Dickensian Queer Street," examines the "diffuse power of money in a capitalist society" (30). Dobbins takes the example of Our Mutual Friend. She discusses the lower-class bank clerk and his apparent access to magical powers, part of the mystification of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Here Dobbins argues that of all nineteenth-century writers, Dickens was the most aware of "the queer power of money" (31). Yet he also satirizes the fetishization of "facts," as in Hard Times (31), thus complicating his position. I would argue that Dickens may well have discerned the mystification of capitalism, but that didn't stop him from mystifying it himself.
In Chapter 2, "Jane Eyre's Purse," Dobbins notes that many Victorian novels, including those by women such as George Eliot, highlight women's financial incompetence and dependency (62). While there have been numerous queer readings of Brontë, including of her letters, Dobbins focuses on the economic aspect of what John Maynard calls the "queer heterosexuality" of Brontë's fiction (65). She calls the plot of The Professor "tedious" and complains about its "unpleasant first-person male narrator" (67). This novel, she says, "affirms that the political economy of self-denial is a masculine virtue" (69). In contrast, a late novel like Villette shows a powerful female protagonist in Lucy Snowe taking on this putatively masculine trait.
Continuing with the theme of undermining and subverting the masculine economy, Chapter 3, "Black Debt and Social Capital in the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands considers the struggles of women of color. Seacole's memoirs present a great narrative and one that has interested scholars since the late twentieth century. Some have read it as the account of a heroic Black woman of the nineteenth century, while others have called Mrs. Seacole an apologist for imperialism. Dobbins's aim is to read the Wonderful Adventures "within neglected nineteenth-century economic histories of Black business, pauper emigration, and female entrepreneurism" (89). She points out that "Victorian studies has often suffered from a 'selective forgetting' of the part Jamaican sugar industries and racialized plantation labor played in the development of Britain's modern, economy" (91). Thus, her Seacole chapter is about recovery of a lost history of Black lived experience within the imperialist economy.
The final chapter, number 4, "The Progressive State and Queer Family Values: George Eliot's Widows, Misers, and Disobedient Daughters," again considers canonical Victorian prose. It would be interesting to see what Dobbins has to say about less well-known works of the period. Taking a more overtly queer approach than in the earlier chapters, here Dobbins discusses "reproductive futurism" as a heteronormative construct (118). This is patrilineal and imperialistic (but also a sensible way to invest). She suggests that Eliot's fiction "reveals nagging doubts about the progressive state," as well as ambivalence about debt and wealth (118-19). In novels like Romola, which contains "strands of economic and sexual dissonance," Dobbins argues that Eliot shows "the queer economic temporality of the widow" (131). Up to this point, Dobbins has not invoked any sexological theory of the nineteenth century.
In the Coda on Wilde, Dobbins finally mentions Kraft-Ebbing and the eroticization of working-class men in images of "rough trade" (155). At first, I felt that it may be a stretch to connect Wilde's downfall to economic exchange as she does. Surely it's the legal and moral homophobia that is central here, rather than male prostitution? However, as Sheila Rowbotham has pointed out, the socialist view of Wilde at the time was that he was a predatory upper-class man, preying on the economically and socially vulnerable (Joyce 166). The reciprocity enjoined by Edward Carpenter is not attached to Wilde and his relationships, and economic forces are clearly important here. Dobbins mentions "the unspeakable" (153), and that includes Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. Perhaps more on the unspeakable and economic dissonance would have connected queerness more compellingly to her argument. However, I may be quibbling. This is a concise book with suggestive and interesting readings of the novels. It offers a contrast with LGBT Victorians in being less densely theoretical and less based on historical figures. The book combines thoughtful literary analysis with economic history and is thus both readable and useful for students of Victorian fiction and history. Read together, both books are enlightening and thoroughly researched, and both demonstrate the Victorian — and Victorianist — spirit of resistance, vitality, and community.
Books under Review
Dobbins, Meg. Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2022.
Joyce, Simon. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Created 23 May 2023